March 13, 2021 Share
An investigation into the official response to Daniel Prude’s police suffocation death last year in Rochester, New York, is faulting the city’s mayor and former police chief for keeping critical details of the case secret for months and lying to the public about what they knew.
The report, commissioned by Rochester’s city council and made public Friday, said Mayor Lovely Warren lied at a September press conference when she said it wasn’t until August that she learned officers had physically restrained Prude during the March 23, 2020, arrest that led to his death.
Warren was told that very day that officers had used physical restraint, the report said, and by mid-April she, then-Police Chief La’Ron Singletary and other officials were aware Prude had died as a result and the officers were under criminal investigation.
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Mar 12, 2021
NewsRadio WHAM 1180 Reporting - The independent investigator appointed by the Rochester City Council has concluded that the principal reason the city government suppressed information about the death of Daniel Prude for more than four months was to cover it up.
The report says then-Police Chief La Ron Singletary s disclosures to the city s Corporation Counsel and the Communications Director deemphasized the role of police restraints in Prude s death, and did not capture the disturbing tenor of the encounter.
The report says those characterizations likely impacted how the City officials viewed what had occurred.
It says Corporation Counsel Tim Curtin discouraged Mayor Warren from going public, citing reasons that were factually incorrect or without a legal basis.
Rochester mayor and top officials ‘suppressed’ information about Daniel Prude’s death, independent report says
An independent investigation commissioned by the Rochester, New York, City Council found that four key city officials including Mayor Lovely Warren suppressed information surrounding the death of Daniel Prude, the 41-year-old Black man who died last year in police custody.
The report, conducted by the law firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP, was released by the Rochester City Council Friday.
According to the report, Warren, former Police Chief La’Ron Singletary, corporation counsel Timothy Curtin, and Rochester communications director Justin Roj were all aware by “mid-April 2020” that a medical examiner had determined that Prude died from “asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint” by Rochester police officers who were under criminal investigation for their conduct.
An investigation into the official response to Daniel Prude’s police suffocation death last year in Rochester, N.Y., is faulting the city’s mayor and former police chief for keeping critical details of the case secret for months and lying to the public about what they knew.